Edit: I still like to remember the good old days.
Originally posted October 25, 2016 on AIXchange
I’m a fan of history, especially technology-related history. So as I get older, I like to reminisce about “the good old days.” Like when I attended Desert Code Camp 2016 earlier this month.
The event, held at Chandler-Gilbert Community College in Chandler, Ariz., was great. Sessions were focused toward developers, including one that covered IBM Watson and Bluemix.
What got me reminiscing is the fact that I actually attended this school back in 1987, shortly after it opened. It was fun to walk around the campus and see the growth and change that’s taken place over nearly 30 years. While several of the original buildings and computer labs still stand, it was enough of a change to show me that life marches on.
Adding to that weekend’s retro feel, The Retro Wagon filled a room with classic hardware: everything from Altairs, teletypes, Commodore 64s, TRS80s and Apple II computers to slide rules and acoustic couplers. It was like walking into a time warp. If you follow me on Twitter (@robmcnelly) you might have seen photos of some vintage machines. Otherwise, check out The Retro Wagon Twitter feed, which is available from their homepage.
It’s amazing to think that when I was in college and a lot of that technology was being unveiled, my favorite operating system was also part of that era’s innovation. Yes, AIX turns 30 this year. If you’re wondering what AIX was like at its inception, read what some of the key people involved in its creation had to say in this IBM Systems Magazine 20-year retrospective from 2006. There are some great memories, along with some names that you may remember from conferences you’ve attended over the years.
But what about the rest of the story? What can we say about the past 10 years of AIX?
One highlight that immediately comes to my mind is that the latest release of AIX. AIX 7.2 TL1 allows customers to upgrade their operating system with no downtime. Think of what we can do on the fly now: we can patch one VIO server, reboot it and patch the redundant VIO server in the pair — and the VIO clients shouldn’t even notice. We can non-disruptively update system firmware in many cases. We can take minor outages to patch our PowerHA clusters. And now we can patch our OS without an outage. I see Ubuntu is working on something called Livepatch, but I wonder how long it will be before another operating system can be patched on the fly the way AIX can.
The past 10 years of AIX have also given us Live Partition Mobility, where we can move running workloads between POWER6, POWER7 and POWER8 servers.
We have PowerHA, built into the OS with Cluster Aware AIX (CAA).
We have shared storage pools. We have multiple shared processor pools.
We have more granularity when creating virtual machines.
We have CAPI and the capability to have I/O cards talk directly to the CPU.
We have POWER8 processors that give us up to 8 threads per core.
We have active memory expansion and we have WPARs. We have the capability to run AIX 5.2 or AIX 5.3 in a WPAR.
Then there are the products that come with AIX Enterprise Edition, including PowerSC, PowerVC, Cloud Manager and the Dynamic System Optimizer.
There’s plenty more that I didn’t mention. The point is that the past 10 years has produced substantial improvements that have made AIX a more powerful operating system with more advanced virtualization capabilities and more powerful hardware. And these improvements have made our jobs easier.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine where AIX will be in another 10 years, but as much as I like looking back, I’m even more excited about what’s ahead. Just think, 2026 will be the 40th anniversary of AIX. What will we be able to do then? What won’t we be able to do?